Things I suck at -- VOL 1: First person shooter games

We can't all be great at everything. But I come pretty close. I'd say I am at least passably good at just about every possible activity (I just don't really feel like showing you right now, is the thing) ... but there are a few glaring exceptions. I mean seriously, painfully glaring exceptions. It's time to face my weaknesses and lay them bare for all the world to see, because then I can claim to be humble and just send people links to blog posts as undeniable proof.

The first activity that I will openly admit to being absolutely terrible at? First person shooter games for X-Box or Playstation 2 and up.

I remember well the first time I tried to play Halo. I was in college, and a group of students was playing in someone's dorm room. I stopped by and they insisted that I take a turn, even though I told them over and over again that I didn't know how to play. But they wouldn't take no for an answer, so I was handed a controller and immediately saw a problem.

This was my first experience with a controller that had two joysticks I was required to use. Instead of my point of view just naturally looking whichever way I was walking (like in the best game ever, Goldeneye for Nintendo 64), I had to actually control whether I wanted to look up, down, right or left while walking in a complete different direction. The right joystick was for telling your character where to walk, and the left was for telling him where to look.

For me, this left-side joystick was harder to master than the French horn (which I hear is pretty hard -- I've never tried it -- but I bet I'd be super good at it right away). I was constantly, tragically, and comically unable to look in the same direction that I was walking. I would stumble blindly into corners and down staircases while aiming my gun at my own feet, the ceiling, or somewhere off in the distance. To my in-game enemies, I looked something like this:

Nobody puts Baby in the corner!!! Baby is perfectly capable of doing that herself.

So yeah, I died a lot. And quickly.

Eventually, I pieced together what a large part of my problem was: that I needed to go into the settings and choose "invert". It turns out that I spent so much time looking the wrong way because every time I tried to look down, I'd look up, and vice versa. So inverting the controls really helped a lot (I also have a 100% failure rate in properly operating car windows, for the exact same reason. Any brain scientists out there want to explain why that is, exactly??). 

With the inverted controls, at least I wasn't stumbling around like a blind idiot and was somewhat capable of moving and looking where I wanted to. Did this elevate me to the level of X-Box grand master?


F**king of course not.

No seriously -- f*** that f***ing game.

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